Thursday, May 5, 2016

From time
to time, I do charitable things to help others. Normally, I do things like that
very quietly. I don’t want accolades or acknowledgements. I just want to help
when I can.

This time,
the help that I want to do is too large for me to do alone.

I need
your help.

Here is
the text from a GoFundMe Account that I’ve set up. Please consider donating –
even a dollar helps:

“Hi. I'm T. M. Bilderback.

Many of you know me as the author and creator of the Justice Security series of
novels and short stories. But, I also work in the real world at a community
college.

Being at a community college gives me the opportunity of meeting many different
students with many different special needs.

One of those students is 19-year-old Tristian Lyn Klein.

Tristian is a student at Nashville State Community College in Waverly,
Tennessee. She has Type 2 Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or SMA. She wears leg braces
that allow her to walk. She recently got new braces that allow for more knee
movement - take a look:

However, Tristian's ankles don't have
enough mobility to allow her to press down on the gas pedal of a car.

She looked into getting a conversion for her car that would allow her to drive
completely with her hands, but the cost of the conversion, along with the cost
of the lessons she would have to take to learn to drive with only her hands,
are too expensive for her family.

To make this happen, I need YOU. I need your donations to reach our goal of
$5,000 to convert a family automobile to hand-drive, and to pay for the lessons
needed to learn this new way of driving.

Tristian needs her own transportation.

Please help. I don't usually ask for help like this publically - I prefer to do
things like this quietly. But, our goal is to have this done by August, 2016,
and I need your help to do it. I would be extremely thankful to you, and I know
Tristian will be, too.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Did you
know that detail can be used in both fiction and non-fiction writing?

I’m not
talking about conversations, or plots, or outlines. I’m talking about good,
basic, descriptive detail.

Suppose
you’re writing a how-to book on, say, using an apple slicer on an apple. You
might say the following:

“Take the
apple slicer and center the core hole over the stem of the apple. Push the
slicer down forcefully so that the slicer slices the apple into small crescents
while the center circle cores the apple.”

Now,
convert that how-to paragraph into fiction:

“Stella,
lost in thought, took the apple slicer and centered the core hole over the stem
of the apple. She pushed the slicer down forcefully so that the slicer sliced
the apple into small crescents while the center circle cored the apple.”

That’s
past tense. It can also be done in present tense:

“Stella is
lost in thought as she takes the apple slicer and centers the core hole over
the stem of the apple. She pushes the slicer down forcefully so that the slicer
slices the apple into small crescents while the center circle cores the apple.”

Do you see
the difference?

If you are
describing how a character does something, and you want to use detail, it might
help you to jot down a careful how-to before you begin writing. Afterward, you
can use the same how-to to adapt to your character’s actions.

Of course,
if you don’t want to go into detail, you can always “shorten” the action:

“Stella,
lost in thought, cut the apple into slices.”

Bor-ing!

Now,
sometimes, it’s useful to shorten the action. If someone is driving a car, for
instance, you really don’t want to list each move your character makes – it
could take up half of your manuscript describing each step in driving to the
grocery store and back!

And sometimes,
you want each step described for a reason. Suppose Stella is angry, and has
many apples to slice and core. You might make note of that fact:

“Stella,
lost in angry thought, took the apple slicer and centered the core hole over
the stem of the apple. She pushed the slicer down forcefully so that the slicer
sliced the apple into small crescents while the center circle cored the apple.
She reached for another apple and repeated her motions, growing angrier as she
worked her way through the apples, until each apple was no longer a neat pile
of slices and cores, but a mixture of random apple pieces.”

It is
implied that Stella has lost control of herself with her anger, and began
chopping apples uncontrollably.

Using your
knowledge of how things work, or how you perform various actions, you can write
your fiction so that it conveys the idea that your characters are everyday
people working their way through daily routines.